I have a nickname – The Annoying Marketeer. I’m more than happy with this nickname by the way as it means I’m doing my job.
Why do I have this nickname? Because I ask so many questions of my SME clients in order to build solid marketing foundations.
Why? Because marketing is the lifeblood of any business and I want to help them build the business they desire. And building solid foundations now will enable you to reap significant rewards in the future.
Auditing your current customer base is a key exercise to undertake as this will:
💡 Help you build an understanding of who you are already doing business with.
💡 To understand which of your customers deliver the maximum returns for you.
💡 To start building insight into your core target audience.
💡 To help you identify your ideal target audience profile.
You may need to interrogate your CRM system, so here goes…
💡 How many current customers do you have?
💡 How many lapsed customers do you have?
💡 How many hot prospects do you have?
So relatively simple to start with, as long as you have a CRM! But well worth the effort even if you don’t to start to build your understanding of your data.
Now to take this line of questioning a bit further and look at the sectors in which your customers operate and which products or services they purchase from you.
Only by answering these questions will you uncover certain trends that may have not been evident before. And this is important because you may well excel in servicing specific sectors or certain products and services may be more popular. And the more specific you can be with your messaging the more likely you are to achieve engagement.
🚀 What sectors do your current customers, lapsed customers and hot prospects operate in?
🚀 Are there any sector trends?
🚀 Do you excel in certain sectors?
🚀 Which products or services do your customers purchase from you?
🚀 Are there any purchasing trends?
So by now you should be able identify any trends with your current and lapsed customers and hot prospects.
So if you’ve answered those then you should have a good idea about how many of them you have, the sectors they operate in and which products and services they have purchased from you.
Turning attention to current and lapsed customers specifically…
🦋 What trading criteria are appropriate and key to your business, for example, sector, profitability, low or high maintenance, future potential, size of business, location, product or service purchased from you?
🦋 Can you rank these factors in order of importance?
🦋 Can you rank your customers against these criteria and identify those that make an ideal profile?
🦋 Are there any product or service purchase trends?
🦋 Are there any purchase gaps i.e. products or services that have been purchased infrequently?
🦋 How can you use this knowledge to attract new customers?
Now to dig a bit deeper into your target audience and starting to build an understanding of the decision making unit.
🧨 Who are the ultimate decision makers?
🧨 What criteria do they base their decision on to purchase from you?
🧨 Who has an influence on the decision to purchase from you?
🧨 What information do they look for to influence the decision to purchase?
You can plot these into a matrix identifying job titles and influencing criteria. This will significantly build your understanding of the people you need to be influencing and communicating with, whether decision maker or influencer.
Now questions to help you start looking at your messaging.
🧨 Why did your customers purchase from you?
🧨 What pain points do you solve?
🧨 What outcomes do you deliver?
🧨 If not already understood can we conduct research to identify why your customers purchased from you?
Research can be from a single telephone call with your customers for example, or customer surveys, interviews with your sales team or asking your customer service team what their experience is.
Once you’ve answered these questions you should now also have a good understanding of what messages are important to your target audience to inform your marketing communications.
There are literally scores of questions to answer to build a solid understanding of your customer and prospects data and so far we have only scratched the surface. But I hope this blog has been helpful.